Paradiso, Canto XXIX

Canto XXIX has the feeling of being a place-holder, a rest before the big finale. Beatrice and Dante stand on the edge of the Empyrean, and he has one more question before they enter. But he doesn’t state it; she looks into the mind of God, with whom she is in perfect communion, and divines Dante’s thought:

She said: “I tell you, without asking you,

what you would hear, for I see your desire

where every where and every when is centered.

I love that formulation: all space and all time is within God.

Dante wants to know why God created anything, if He was perfectly good and perfectly self-sufficient. Beatrice explains that all creation came into existence at once. Because of love, she says. God didn’t create to increase His goodness; that would be impossible. He created to share the splendor of his love. The point seems to be that love is not static; love must create by its nature. Love cannot be contained. God’s love pours throughout all creation, and did so instantly, from the moment of creation:

As in crystal or in amber or in glass

a shaft of light diffuses through the whole,

its ray reflected instantaneously

The farthest spot in all creation from heaven is at the center of the earth, in Dante’s geocentric cosmology. And that is where the devil lives, “crushed by the weight of all the universe.”

They talk about the angels. Beatrice says that the angels “were humbly prompt to recognize their great intelligence as coming from the Goodness of their Lord.” As soon as they saw the face of God, their wills were fixed; they could not sin. They entered eternity. They loved God perfectly, so their wills were made perfect by His grace. The prideful angels, by contrast, refused to recognize that their intelligence, and every good thing, was a gift to them from God. They thought they were at the center of their own world, just as the damned in the Inferno do.

Beatrice takes a moment to blast bad preaching. Believe me, if you’ve ever sat through crap homilies by jokester clerics, or through pseudo-sophisticated homilies from preachers who go out of their way to deny the plain meaning of Scripture, or Church teaching, you’ll love this. Beatrice says men on earth get too carried away by philosophizing, trying to invent novelties instead of preaching the plain Gospel, and sticking to the tradition. “Men do not care what blood it cost to sow the Word throughout the land, nor how pleasing he is who humbly takes Scripture to heart,” she says. Then:

Christ did not say to his first company:

‘Go forth and preach garbage unto the world,’

but gave them, rather, truth to build upon.

…Now men go forth to preach wisecracks and jokes,

and just so long as they can get a laugh

to puff their cowls with pride – that’s all they want;

But if the crowd could see the bird that nestles

In tips of hoods like these, they soon would see

What kind of pardons they are trusting in.

Beatrice warns that the laity cannot claim ignorance as an excuse for following bad preaching and teaching. Ordinary people, she says, must have enough knowledge of their religion to be able to listen to a preacher and know when he is full of it.

Amazing how contemporary this is, yes?

Beatrice, again on the angels:

The primal Light shines down through all of them

and penetrates them in as many ways

as there are splendors with which It may mate.

And since the visual act always precedes

The act of loving, bliss of love in each

burns differently: some glow while others blaze.

And now you see the height, you see the breadth

of Eternal Goodness that divides Itself

into these countless mirrors that reflect

Itself, remaining One, as It was always.

She’s talking about angels, and this is highly metaphysical, but this could also describe God’s relationship with us. To the extent we love, we both transmit the divine light, and reflect it. The more we love, the brighter we glow. The lesson here is that creation is dynamic, always receiving love from the Creator; it is our choice, though, the extent to which we wish to receive the light, and join the celestial harmony. God interpenetrates Creation in a fertile fashion. This, we will see when we study Inferno, is why the sodomites are damned: they refuse fertility, thus live in disharmony with the divine order. In fact, in Dante, everything and everyone that refuses the divine order is spiritually dead, because they cut themselves off from the source of all Life. What’s especially interesting about that Inferno canto (XV) concerning the sodomites is that sex is never discussed. Rather, sterility is examined by the example of Brunetto Latini, the writer and teacher, who advises Dante to write only for his own glory, and:

“Follow your constellation

and you cannot fail to reach your port of glory,

not if I saw clearly in the happy life…”

But Brunetto did not see clearly; he is in Hell. At this point in the poem — Paradiso 29, I mean — Dante has now reached the port of glory, the entrance to the Empyrean, not by following his own constellation — that’s how he ended up in the dark wood. He has done it by humbling himself to listen to the God-given authority of Virgil, and then Beatrice, as well as all the penitents and saints he has met along the way.

Giuseppe Mazzotta, in his reflection on this canto, says that here, as Dante arrives at the pinnacle of all Time — which is to say, at the fulfillment of all desire — we should think back to the two figures in the Inferno (figures that I think Dante is most like). There is Francesca, from Inferno 5, who damned herself by following her own lust (which she mistook for love) to her physical and spiritual death; she, says Mazzotta, is a “metaphysician of desire,” but her desire was to consume and consume and consume, burning through everything to reach a state of bliss and consummation. She navigated by her own constellation, and sailed to her ruin.

Ulysses, the second figure Mazzotta brings up, literally navigated to his ruin in Inferno 26. He didn’t lust for sensual and emotional fulfillment; his disordered, all-consuming desire was for exploration, for pushing beyond all boundaries to find out what was there. He recognized no boundaries but his own heart’s desire, and found death and damnation. Mazzotta:

Both Francesca and Ulysses would have liked to arrive where Dante is currently, able to witness a conjunction of space and time, ubi and quando, [where and when] to the the point where all things cohere.

We all seek the same thing: bliss, fulfillment, connection, rest. But there is only one way to find it: through unity with God, with the Absolute. Every other goal puts us wide of the mark, and will end in death. Every other goal is ultimately a refusal of love, no matter what we think. In choosing ourselves over God — as every soul in Hell has done — we worship the created over the Creator. Do it often enough, and it becomes ever more impossible to comprehend the Light. Humility, however minuscule, is all it takes to receive a saving ray of the Divine Light. But if we die in our pride, we will be cast into the outer darkness for all eternity.

Dante has been to the basement of the universe, where he saw Satan frozen in torment, and now he is at the ceiling of the top floor of the universe, about to break through to the other side. There will be no more desiring after this. Time ends. The explorer is very nearly home.

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13 Responses to Paradiso, Canto XXIX

Ordinary people, she says, must have enough knowledge of their religion to be able to listen to a preacher and know when he is full of it.

I must note, that this is the fundamental point of the Protestant Reformation.

True, many Protestant clerics are full of it… and many of those preach blind obedience, to themselves… and to them I always say, if obedience is your point, why don’t you return your obedience to Rome?

What’s interesting about lines 139-141 is the idea of causality. This translation reads:

And since the visual act always precedes
The act of loving, bliss of love in each
burns differently: some glow while others blaze.

The Hollander translation reads:

Therefore, since affection follows
the act of conceiving, love’s sweetness glows
with differing radiance, more brightly or subdued.

What is the cause and what the effect? It sounds as if Dante is saying that the differing capacity for seeing/understanding determines the difference degrees of love.

Flipping back to earlier cantos, I run across this verse:

And you should know that all of them delight
in measure of the depth to which their vision
can penetrate the truth, where every intellect finds rest
XXVIII, 106-108

And XIV, 40-42:

“Its [the radiance clothing the blessed] answers to our ardor,
the ardor to our vision, and that is given
in greater measure on grace than we deserve.

It seems that for Dante, knowledge/vision may have equal weight with love; certainly that it precedes love. Is this correct? I don’t have any volumes of commentary around, and the translation commentaries don’t help. But it’s an interesting question and may be important.

[NFR: If I'm not mistaken, Dante has said that we have to see something (= perceive something) before we can love it. But in learning to love it, we increase our knowledge of it, which is to say, learn to "see" it more clearly. It seems to be dynamic. Remember back in Purgatorio, when he would be shown artistic images depicting the particular virtue he had to learn on that terrace, just after he arrived on the terrace? The idea was that it had to enter into his moral imagination first and be loved by him before he could really appropriate the moral, and be changed by it. I think for Dante, vision does precede love, but it is a dynamic relationship: you have to first see to love, but once you love, and increase your love, you see more, which causes you to love more, etc. -- RD]

“Beatrice explains that all creation came into existence at once. Because of love, she says. God didn’t create to increase His goodness; that would be impossible. He created to share the splendor of his love. ”

Not to take anything away from the very special goodness (for want of a better word) Rod is creating with his posts on Dante – even those of us who aren’t religious value them – but this particular argument, one I’ve often heard religious people make, has never made sense to me. If this is true, why does the universe have a beginning, instead of having always existed? Presumably God’s desire to “share the splendor of his love” didn’t just occur to Him 6,000 or 13 billion years ago. Yes, I understand that in the religious view time did not exist until creation. Still, the universe, and human existence, clearly are finite in time – there was a period when they did not exist. If there was an act of creation, there was a period before the act of creation, and presumably an infinite period. What changed God’s mind? And doesn’t the existence of a before and after suggest some divine need – i.e., imperfection?

A side issue, I know, to the larger points Rod is trying to make. But I’ve never heard a persuasive counter to the argument and perhaps this is a pretty good place to see if one emerges.

You’re going to have to be more precise than this for the book: “This, we will see when we study Inferno, is why the sodomites are damned: they refuse fertility, thus live in disharmony with the divine order.” Monastics refuse fertility for a Kingdom that transcends our puny notions of familial happiness or succession. This is Christian orthodoxy — not Mormonism, or the cheap versions of Protestantism — as you know.

But what captures my attention is the discussion so far in the moist combox, as I can see it.

Angels and humans both have free will, and created from the goodness of God, see God and so love God. This scholasticism is engendered from the concept of *imago dei*, which suggests that we love from a visual imitation. This is what we might call a keen intuition from those “Dark Age cretins”, given recent arguments in biological and psychological research. In the 20th Century, Rene Girard and Jacques Lacan and Object Relation Theorists all discovered this as the developmental/evolutionary biological role of imitation. They argued that seeing and loving come about simultaneously, as a part of the human nurturing process (Helen Keller’s life seems to demonstrate that this nurturing can come through touch, and not simply sight and hearing). Research is also showing that you can gay or trans or whatever, but you gotta be attentive and also careless (at moments) in one’s parenting.

As you note, Dante suggests that the angels in this case saw the good and loved. So did the initial humans — there was divine communion with the man and woman before the breach. But some angels and both humans turned, they willed a rejection of the sense, and so the love. Neither Dante nor Aquinas is arguing that sight or perception determines love. (As you note, Rod, this is a dynamism, but it’s not a one-off, a singular chance, it’s creation as it’s lived.) Love is always happening, for God is Love and so offers the love that informs how we perceive everything (touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste), even as humans or angels refuse to return the love.

Dante and Aquinas are arguing that we are beings that change, by nature free to do otherwise, and then turn again *because of the love*.

For Aquinas, the angels who refuse to accept the image they see given in love damn themselves into a form of intellectual stasis devoid of potential. These fallen angels are deformed singular existential beings, true grotesques (and not O’Connor’s exemplars, who are wildly free). Human beings have a chance, since their forms enliven the flux that *is* matter. Matter gives one a chance — it’s spacetime — it’s quantum. How one acts in matter is everything, for it’s really about how one shapes matter toward love and compassion for others.

We’re going to disagree about “nature” in Dante. Fair enough. I’d still say, see the work of Eleonore Stump on Aquinas and Dante. JSTOR, etc. What we do with the matter we’re given, and how God then relates to us, matters more than any preconceived notion of the perfection of form/matter (our individuality). It’s only about love.

[NFR: Thanks for this comment. Dante no doubt has the sodomites in hell because of their sexual activity, but it's interesting to observe that a) he never discusses sex in those cantos, b) the sodomite he talks to, Brunetto Latini, he treats with love and affection, and c) they speak of the generative power of the artist. This is where Dante makes a connection between directing one's power to participate in the creation of new life to a sterile end, with doing the same thing with one's art. Brunetto is a narcissist. A monk who sacrifices his generative power (sexuality) for the sake of the Kingdom is doing so for the sake of spiritual fruitfulness. At least that's how I think Dante would see it. I'll get more into this when I reach those Cantos in Inferno. -- RD]

Beatrice says: “… God didn’t create to increase His goodness; that would be impossible. He created to share the splendor of his love.”

There is an excellent comment on this quote and I’d like to add a thought to it. In the spiritual realm, so much is mystery and beyond our limited five senses, our dimensions of time and space, and our finite minds and perception. Why and when did God create anything? Who can really know this?

The age of our universe is not really known, and we don’t know what else exists that we cannot know – or when it was created. I don’t think that knowledge will ever be within the grasp of humanity.

I do believe this much. While life is tough for everyone at times, I concentrate on the love and the innumerable gifts I have received…none of which I ever did anything to deserve. Life is a gift and precious. Why was I given life? I cannot lay out the motives of God for creating me, but I’m grateful, deeply grateful. That is enough for me.

To the extent we love, we both transmit the divine light, and reflect it. The more we love, the brighter we glow. The lesson here is that creation is dynamic, always receiving love from the Creator; it is our choice, though, the extent to which we wish to receive the light, and join the celestial harmony. God interpenetrates Creation in a fertile fashion. This, we will see when we study Inferno, is why the sodomites are damned: they refuse fertility, thus live in disharmony with the divine order.

I’ve been puzzling over some themes related to this.

First, why are only the sodomites punished for their infertility? I saw what RD wrote supra about monks, but obviously that’s not a real dichotomy. There are many infertile people who are neither gay nor monks — heterosexual couples who don’t have children, hetero individuals who remain single and never marry (but also never join a monastic order!). So I’m struggling to comprehend why their (voluntary) infertility does not damn them like the sodomites.

Second, I’m confused by how fertile gay couples fit into this (or, in other words, by how we define fertility). I know gay couples who have children, and love them. Their households seem more full of love than the household of a single straight person (again, not a monk), living alone, who refuses to marry or have children. Does adopting a child not “count” in God’s eyes as an act of fertility and love? Or having a child via surrogacy? Do adoption or surrogacy count as fertile “love” for a single hetero person but not for a gay couple? I know a single woman who adopted a child. Both she and gay couples with children are having children disconnected from heterosexual intercourse. But by what I read here and elsewhere, they’re thus damned and she is not. I don’t get the distinction.

Third, I’m frankly confused by the sharp overlap between love and fertility. I’m not sure that the creative aspect of love requires having children — I think of the various voluntarily childless persons I’ve known (straight and gay) who were nevertheless fonts of love toward their friends, their religious communities, their neighbors, their lateral relatives.

Now, obviously I can see how Brunetto went wrong, in terms of narcissism and deficiencies of love. But it’s the quote I highlighted at the beginning of my comment that confuses me: If the sodomites are damned for lack of love, then what of the sodomites who love? If the sodomites are damned for infertility, then what about the other infertiles?

[NFR: Let's back up. The sodomites are in hell for sodomy. Dante was a 14th century Roman Catholic; he would have seen sodomy as damnable. What is interesting about that canto -- and it is in Inferno; let's hold off the discussion of it until we arrive there in Inferno (which I'm going to start blogging next week) -- is that Dante, who was not gay, drew lessons for himself from that level of Hell. In his view, the sodomites willingly turned in to themselves, and use their fertile capacity only to please themselves, because by definition their desires are ordered toward an end that results in sterility. We don't know how Dante felt about contraception, because presumably that wasn't much of an issue in the 14th century. It makes sense that he would have opposed it. Remember, Dante believed that the divine order undergirded the natural order. You can't understand one part of Dante's belief system without uncovering the connections to the whole. -- RD]

If this is true, why does the universe have a beginning, instead of having always existed? Presumably God’s desire to “share the splendor of his love” didn’t just occur to Him 6,000 or 13 billion years ago. Yes, I understand that in the religious view time did not exist until creation. Still, the universe, and human existence, clearly are finite in time – there was a period when they did not exist.

Sheldon,

Actually, in the mathematical-physical models of the Big Bang, both space and time emerge from the singularity at the Big Bang. Thus, in the cosmological view time did not exist until the Big Bang occurred. To ask the question, “What happened before the Big Bang?” is similar to asking “What is north of the North Pole?” Because of the singularity, events that may have happened “before” it have NO observational consequences, so CANNOT be observed. That which “cannot be observed” is logically equivalent to that which “does not exist.” You cannot tell the two apart.

In fact, there is NO global time function for our Universe by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. There can be no universal time clock since matter/gravity distorts locally BOTH space AND time. Causality is also destroyed when observers are moving relative to each other. That is, “before” and “after” only mean something to each individual observer, but we can disagree with each other about these events!

God transcends all Reality, and thus all spaces and all times, yet His light and energy can be observed by us in our Universe (i.e., within the confines of our local concepts of space and time) since it interpenetrates all of His Creation. His Incarnation was observed in Palestine two thousand years ago.

What bothers me about Dante’s account is, what happend to Virgil? It was Virgil who led Dante out of the dark wood and walked him through the first part of his journey. Yet he just leaves Virgil behind and moves on without him through the process that leads to eternal bliss. Does he even offer one petition at the end that Virgil, who did so much for Dante’s salvation, might also be saved?